Site Stats

March 30, 2012

MIT's Great Dome and professors aren't the only victims of famous hacks. Hackers like to fool around with measurement every now and then, too. Here's the tale of the legendary "Smoot," excerpted from Nightwork:

The greatest measurement hack of all time is indisputably the Smoot –named for Oliver Smoot, the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity pledge used to recalculate the length of the Harvard Bridge in 1958. It seems that Lambda Chi fraternity brother Tom O’Connor got it into his head to give his new pledges a chance to do public service. He figured that in making the long trek across the bridge from Boston, where the fraternity was located, some indicator of progress would be helpful when frat brothers held their heads down against the rain, sleet, snow, and gale force winds they sometimes encountered en route.

Smoot, at just under 5’7” was the shortest pledge among the freshman at hand and was thus elected to be the human yardstick. Using swimming-pool paint on the bridge sidewalk, the pledges marked every Smoot with a colorful tick mark and at every 10 Smoots spelled out the full measurement. Eventually, they reached the end of the bridge–at 364.4 Smoots, plus or minus one ear.

Every two years, Lambda Chi pledges repaint the markings, which Cambridge police officers have come to rely on for specifying exact locations when filling out accident reports. After graduating from MIT in 1962, Smoot attended Georgetown University Law School. The man who is perhaps the most famous human-based measure of the twentieth century served as chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and president of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). By some serendipitous twist, the progeny of both Smoot and O’Connor enrolled at MIT’s Sloan School of Management forty years later.

The Alumni Association marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Smooting of the bridge in grand style: the City of Cambridge declared October 4 to be Smoot Day and the Institute dedicated a special plaque to commemorate the occasion. The MIT students who designed the plaque also created a Smoot stick, a permanent tool that will serve as the standard Smoot measure far into the future for MIT students who want to ensure the accuracy of the length of the Harvard Bridge.

Progression of Tardies, 1927Although vowing that he would never shut the door in a student's face, a professor religiously locked the classroom at five minutes past the hour to discourage late arrivals. One day, students waited until five minutes after the bell, then trickled into the room at carefully spaced intervals so the professor could never close the door--at least not for another twenty-five minutes.

Casual Saturday, 1949Students arrived at their early Saturday-morning class in robes and pajamas to protest the cruel and unusual scheduling.

Exam A La Carte, 1978A student threw a red checkered tablecloth over his exam table; set out three bottles of wine, corkscrew, glass, a plate of bread and cheese, and regulation No. 2 pencils before settling in for the test.

Reversal, 1982Industrious hackers reversed all 199 seats in the 2--190 lecture hall so that they faced the back of the room. The prank was all the more ambitious because the seats are bolted to the floor.

Paper Airplane Assignment, 1985Students picked up the usual stack of handouts as they entered the lecture hall, only to find that one was a hack. The sheet gave detailed instructions for making a paper airplane and when to launch it at the lecturer.

Turbojet, 1987Hackers moved the massive turbojet on display in another building to the front of AeroAstro's unified engineering class. On the lecture hall blackboard, they asked, "Can you say Turbojet?"

Giant Clack Balls, 1988One morning, students and faculty arrived in one of the principal campus lecture halls to find an enormous collision ball apparatus suspended at the front of the classroom.

Chalkboard Gremlins, 1981 and 1992Using a handmade radio-controlled device, a hacker raised and lowered the lecture hall chalkboards to the frustration of the lecturer in the 10--250 lecture hall.

6.001 Spellbook, 1992In a spoof on fantasy role-playing incantations, hackers distributed a "spellbook" to students that explained why some of their computer programming projects may go awry.

March 26, 2012

April Fools' Day is fast-approaching, so we've picked a few images of MIT "hacks" from Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT (updated edition) by Institute Historian T.F. Peterson to inspire you. According to T.F. Peterson, "The word 'hack' at MIT usually refers to a clever, benign, and 'ethical' prank or practical joke, which is both challenging for the perpetrators and amusing to the MIT community (and sometimes even the rest of the world!). Note that this has nothing to do with computer (or phone) hacking (which we call 'cracking')." Be sure to check back throughout this week as we celebrate famous MIT pranks.

Originally built for the Franco-Prussian war, the Caltech cannon has never fired a shot in anger, with the possible rumored exception of potshots toward Caltech's student housing office. In the late '60s, the cannon was "decorating" the campus of a private high school near Caltech, when Fleming House students chopped its wheels out of concrete and swiped it. After a back-and-forth, the cannon ended up permanently at Caltech, except for a brief abduction in 1986 by Harvey Mudd College pranksters and its legendary 2006 cross-country jaunt to MIT.

On the fifth anniversary of 9/11, hackers paid unusual tribute to the heroic firefighters of the NYFD. The logo painted on the truck, Meminimus, translates to "We remember," 2006.

Solar-powered MBTA Red Line cars on Dome, 2009.

John Harvard revealed as Halo 3 hero by MIT hackers the night prior to the video game's release, 2007.

"Portrait" of hackers just before completing their work, 1987. Tech Dinghy floats in Alumni Pool.

Hackers create a smiling jack-o'-lantern on the Green Building for Halloween, 1975.

The symbol from the popular movie Jurassic Park shines down from the ceiling of the Lobby 7, 1994.

Almost fully inflated MIT Balloon at the 1982 Harvard-Yale football game.

March 23, 2012

On March 23, 1983, Barney Clark, the world's first recipient of a permanent artificial heart, died only 112 days after his surgery. In Case Studies in Biomedical Research Ethics, Timothy Murphy examines this controversial case and raises questions about the ethics surrounding new medical interventions.

Barney Clark was born in 1921 and, after a lifetime of smoking, was diagnosed in 1978 with emphysema, congestive heart failure, and cardiomyopathy (degeneration of heart tissue). Heart transplantation was relatively new at that time, and Clark at 57 was considered too old to be eligible for the surgery.

A medical committee at the University of Utah was interested in finding a candidate to be the first person to receive an artificial heart, the Jarvik-7 (named after its designer). This committee thought that the candidate should be so ill that death was imminent and the prognosis offered no more than a year of life. Clark met these conditions.

Clark signed an eleven-page consent form, he was interviewed by members of the IRB about his choice, and a team of physicians tried to test his determination by urging him to change his mind. He did not.

Dr. William DeVries led the medical team that supervised the implantation of the artificial heart in a complicated surgery that began at 11 P.M. December 1, 1982. The Jarvik-7 was a mechanical device that was hooked by tubes to an external air compressor to move blood. The external compressor weighed 375 pounds, and Clark could never be without it. After the operation, Clark was in poor state and experienced considerable confusion, delirium, memory loss, periods of semiconsciousness, and seizures. He required surgical intervention to replace one of the heart valves which broke two weeks after the initial operation.

Clark’s health was never especially good, but he did appear before videocameras, and selectively edited videos were released to the media. This public visibility gave the impression that he was glad to be alive. In fact, Clark’s overall condition could only be called burdensome, and he died on March 23, 1983, of multiple organ failure. It was not long before scientists were split in their opinion about the value of the artificial heart. Some called it one of the boldest experiments ever attempted. Others said it more than failed. Still others called in unacceptably expensive. DeVries defended the artificial heart noting that, without it, Clark would have been dead by midnight on December 1, 1982.

The FDA, which oversees medical devices, allowed DeVries three more tries with the Jarvik-7. The first of these patients died after surviving for twenty-one months; the second survived for ten months and two days; the third survived ten days. In the last case, DeVries admitted that the surgery had probably shortened the patient’s life. In 1990 the FDA withdrew approval for use of the Jarvik-7 as a permanent device, or even as a bridge for a patient awaiting a human heart transplant. Patient referrals to DeVries dropped, because other physicians were concerned that he had too many conflicts of interest rooted in his desire for success and financial gain. They worried that he was putting technical success ahead of patient care.

Murphy closes this examination by leaving readers with the following three questions:

To what extent is it ethical for a health care team to offer a patient an intervention that might possibly extend his life and then try and persuade him to not accept it?

What information do you think would be crucial in explaining the risks and benefits of an artificial heart transplant?

It is reasonable to expect some failure with new medical interventions. In your view, do the survival times of the patients in this case amount to a reason to shut down the use of a mechanical heart, or should more attempts be allowed?

"While others took the conventional way," said Urban Studies and Planning Department head Amy K. Glasmeier, "Alice took another path. She was fearless. By any measure, Alice was one of the most, if not the most, accomplished heterodox economist in the world.”

A memorial service at MIT will be held later in the spring. She will be missed.

March 16, 2012

As we gear up for this weekend's St. Patrick's Day celebrations, let's not forget to toast St. Urho of Finland today. Who is St. Urho, you ask?

According to The Prosthetic Impulse, edited by Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra, “St. Urho’s Day is celebrated each year on March 16 in certain northern Minnesotan and northwestern Ontario towns with significant Finnish populations… Since the mid-1950s, St. Urho’s Day has parodied St. Patrick’s Day, which is celebrated the following day. St. Urho’s apocryphal feat was to have, like St. Patrick, rid his country of a certain kind of creature. Instead of snakes, St. Urho expelled the grasshoppers from Finland, thus saving the vineyards and wine production. In a reversal worthy of postmodern slippage, the Irish are said to have stolen the idea from the Finns.”

As a philosophy student, I was always interested in how the mind worked, and by that I meant how the brain worked. When I started looking at the attempts by scientists to address these questions, back in the mid 60s, I discovered that they were, with a few notable exceptions, baffled. The pioneers who had some hunches fascinated me, and I began to try to follow in their footsteps and even help with the exploration.

How have your research interests and methods changed over the course of your career?

I've learned--and had to learn--a lot of empirical science and scientific techniques. The philosophical imagination unhindered by facts is actually a very unreliable organ of discovery. My work has always depended on the constraints I have picked up from the various sciences that deal with the questions I'm interested in.

What kinds of changes (if any) do you think we need to make in brain science education?

There have already been huge changes. Even high school students can acquire a vivid, robust, dynamic (if sketchy) model of what the working parts of the brain are, and roughly how they interact. That rough-and-ready roadmap of the brain was something that took years of hard and imaginative work to acquire forty years ago. Since everybody gets to start much better prepared these days, the time is right for bold theorizing. We have the tools and the data to DISconfirm models now. What we need are intrepid model-proposers. They will usually be wrong, but we'll learn a lot. From one perspective most of what we've learned in the last half century is what promising ideas WON'T work. That's progress.

March 15, 2012

Three cheers for Women's History Month! We're giving away a copy of Women Artists at the Millennium, edited by Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher, to celebrate. In Women Artists at the Millennium, artists including Martha Rosler and Yvonne Rainer reflect upon their own varied practices and art historians discuss the innovative work of such figures as Louise Bourgeois, Lygia Clark, Mona Hatoum, and Carrie Mae Weems.

Answer the question below for a chance to win a copy of the book. Submit your answers as a comment on this post, and you will be entered into a drawing to win. The deadline to enter the contest is March 22nd, and we will notify the lucky winner on March 23rd.

My undergraduate major was in Biochemistry, a field that was attractive to me for several reasons. Above my desk, I had pinned a large chart of "Biochemical Pathways" and I often marveled at the intertwined chains of chemical reactions that govern cellular metabolism, tightly controlled by complex biomolecules that catalyze specific reactions and regulate the flow of material. I wanted to understand the principles that organized this mess of molecules (at least that's what it looked like at first glance) into a coherent biochemical system. I began modeling some simple examples of molecular kinetics, and thus became familiar with mathematical tools like differential equations and coupling structures, also called a connectivity matrix. Later, when my attention shifted to the brain, I naturally brought along these tools and started modeling networks of neurons and brain regions. It seemed natural to me to look for principles of neural organization in the brain's connection matrix, and that got me into reading about graph theory and networks. I haven't stopped since.

How have your research topics and/or methods changed over the course of your career?

I started as a student of biochemistry, running long series of experiments in "wet labs". At the same time I pursued what was then called "mathematical biology", with an interest in "systems theory" and models of pattern formation. During my PhD, I switched to neuroscience, modeling neural networks (a novelty item in the 1980's!) and even interfacing such neural models with robots. Robotics really brought taught me an important lesson about how the brain is fundamentally embodied, especially how important it is to engage in bodily movement to sample and select inputs in an environment. My first forays into graph theory and studies of brain connectivity were difficult to "sell" for many years --hardly anyone cared! Luckily I persisted: suddenly, just a few years ago, in parallel with the general expansion of network science across many disciplines and driven by the availability of new brain connectivity data sets, network approaches to the understanding the brain really took off. Now I find myself reading papers, working with colleagues and attending conferences across a very wide range of topics -- from statistical physics and computational intelligence, to brain imaging and complex systems. I can't wait to find out where this journey will take me next.

What kinds of changes (if any) do you think we need to make in brain science education?

I think that modern brain science should deserves to occupy a central role in the general curriculum -- perhaps more central than it is now. As I like to tell my students on the first day of class: There's nothing boring about the brain! A wide range of issues that have immediate personal or societal impact, from an individual's memory, emotions, consciousness, and decision making all the way to behavioral economics, social communication, and brain and mental disorders, all revolve around the nexus of brain and behavior. Learning about the brain and its relation to body and environment is learning about ourselves and our place in the social and biological world. Brain science education should give students the tools to explore how our mental life depends on the functioning of the brain, and how our behavior is shaped by how brain and body interact. Some of the most exciting research in these areas is carried out by bridging traditional disciplines, combining evolution and development, physiology and anatomy, computation and networks, psychology and cognitive science. All these disciplines contribute to our modern understanding of the brain, and all of them should have a place in modern brain science education.